Throttling and rate limiting policies allow you to limit access to your APIs. Rate limiting allows you to ensure stability of the API when there are too many requests coming in. Throttling allows you to limit the number of successful hits to an API during a certain time frame, typically in situations such as the following:
- To protect your APIs from common types of security attacks such as certain types of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.
- To regulate traffic according to infrastructure availability.
- To make an API, application, or a resource available to a consumer at different levels of service, usually for monetization purposes.
WSO2 API Cloud allows you to define throttling at the API, application, resource, and subscription levels by creating required throttling policies. You can apply one or more throttling policies at different levels depending on your requirement. Take a look at the following topics for detailed information on working with various throttling policies: